Family

What would we really do if we won the state lottery? BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

My mother likes to talk about what she'd do if she won the lottery. She starts out magnanimous, claiming she'd hand wads of dough over to charity. But it doesn't take long for her to come clean. "Who am I kidding?" she says. "I'd blow the whole thing."

It's tempting to wonder whether Roy Cone did the same thing.

Five years ago, the Torrington resident won $1 million off a $30 scratch card. Soon after, he and his wife paid cash for a wood-framed house now appraised at $210,499.

Last month, a Wallingford group bought the house at auction for $102,000.

As the Republican-American reported, Cone, who hasn't paid his taxes since 2007, owes the city $32,418.48 in taxes, interest and lien fees.

What happened to the money?

Well, he won't talk to the newspaper, but we can hazard a guess.

Many of us might think that Cone is an anomaly, an insatiable prodigal whose luck was in inverse proportion to his self-control. And maybe that's true. Maybe he lathered the stores with dough and sated his every material whim. It was free money, after all, and it's hard to blame a guy for going a little hog wild with it.

When my mother talks about winning the lottery, part of her reverie involves self-definition. It's what a lot of us are really talking about when we talk about money. If we had more funds, we tell ourselves, we'd be able to unleash ourselves from the shackles of obligation and become our most authentic selves: More generous, extroverted, hip, and frivolous. We'd be a lot more fun if we were rich. We would not be the dour, staid suburbanites that finances have obliged us to be. We'd power around in motor boats, sail the Mediterranean, pick up the check for old ladies.

But many people who win the lottery end up in a revised economic and moral landscape in which it is difficult to find their footing. Although more than half of Americans play the lottery intermittently, it's generally the poor and less educated who waste the most of their money on lotteries. Houses with an income below $13,000 spend 9 percent of their income on lotteries, reports the Commission on Thrift. And it's generally the same group of people playing the lottery. About 80 percent of tickets are bought by 20 percent of players. These are generally people who lack the budgetary acumen of Warren Buffett.

Take Curtis Sharp, a New Jersey air conditioning technician who won $5 million in the lottery in 1982, swiftly losing the whole thing. Or Wisconsin's Andrew Cicero, who lost most of the $5.5 million he won in 1995. Or John and Sandy, an Ohio couple profiled in Money magazine whose $12.4 million share of a jointly-won $161.5 million Powerball jackpot plunged them into a universe of desperation and exploitation, straining friendships and family ties. The couple was besieged by frantic supplicants trying to escape violent homes or fund their child's education. They now sleep with a loaded gun under the bed and refuse to disclose the location of their house.

"I've never been so depressed in my life as after we hit the Powerball," Sandy told the magazine. "Things were just so much easier when we had the little house, and I was babysitting my niece and nephews. You've just got to worry about so much now."

We like to think that money will change us for the better, but for the most part, money leaves us with the same defects and inconsistencies. Even if we could count on our own enhancement, we cannot foresee how money would change those around us. And despite study after study that demonstrates that money does not ensure happiness — the best research shows that the happiness-money calculus tops off about $75,000 annually — we keep thinking we can beat the odds.

It's the belief that we can beat the odds that incites us to fork over about $60 billion annually in lottery tickets, or twice the annual budget of the National Institutes of Health. The odds that we can do strike it rich are long, but not nearly as long as the odds that we will spend that money wisely.

" first, take the lump sum payout and move to a tax friendly state. payoff any outstanding debt; retire leaving a job for a younger person who then needs it more than me... and diversely invest the payout, living off the dividend. I'd establish accts for each of my kids..Then depending on how much I won, DISCRETELY help others who are in need. ONLY God needs to see your good works, as there is far too much lookame back patting and award giving these days.. "

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Travel

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